Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Tales from the Dark Side


So Groucho the Weezy Laptop PC died today, at a tender age of four weeks. It was a minor catastrophy - I just opened her up this morning and the screen would not function. Judging this to be A Bad Thing, I took it back to Fry's Electronics to get it fixed, armed with my receipts and warranties.

Now, as a long-time Mac user, I am more than prepared to find myself pitched headfirst into the perdition that is consumer service. In reality, it went suprisingly smoothly. I was still under warranty, the young man I dealt with was knowledgable, and where he was out of his depth he brought in those that were knowledgable. He tried the same stuff I tried right off the bat, then brought in another monitor to prove it was the monitor light, not the CPU. Filled out paperwork to get it repaired, and then gave me a loaner of the same make and model. It took about an hour to wade through the paperwork, another hour to upload the programs I had on the original, and a half hour to and from. Hardly the pain and agony that you normally hear about at the web. Good job for Fry's.

I'll keep you posted on the progress, but for the moment, things are going pretty well in the face of a rather nasty catastrophy.

More later,